Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist and a philosopher. He is categorized as a behaviorist following his famous rat experiment which he conducted to demonstrate that behavior is influenced not by individuals’ will but by other variables which are external to the individuals.
He took a hungry rat and placed it in a cage and then placed a lever and a food tray. Since the rat was hungry, it would wander in the cage sniffing everywhere and accidentally stepped on the lever, which would trigger the release of a food pellet into the food tray. Skinner observed that the frequency of pressing the lever increased up to the time when the rat was no longer hungry.
This experiment drove Skinner to reach the conclusion that there is nothing like free will but rather, behavior was a consequence of our actions. If actions carry positive rewards, the corresponding behaviors are perfected. Similary, if certain behaviors are not rewarded, they are avoided.
Skinner belonged to the school of thought which contents that human behavior is determined by our cultural orientations and psychological profiling. If we live in a culture whereby for example girls are married at a tender age, then the girls who live in that culture have got no option other than to get married at tender age because the culture stipulates so.
We may also be influenced by our psychological profiling when making some decisions. For example, if we have a tendency of being nymphomaniac (the desire of women to want as much sex and as frequent as possible) then our behavior is already determined by our psychological profiling and therefore we have no option other than to want as much sex as possible.
Determinism in this sense therefore can be said to disregard morality by contenting that we are what we are and we cannot be otherwise (Honderich, 2005).
Despite Skinner’s stand against free will, he went ahead and introduced the concept of self control. What he meant by self control was that human beings were able to generate various responses in an attempt to change their behavior. As stated earlier, human behavior is shaped by the environment in which an individual lives.
Self control occurs through changing the environment, which subsequently changes the behavior of an individual. For example, if a person stays near a place where chocolates are sold just outside the door of the house; there are high chances that the person would develop the habit of eating chocolates every time he or she sees them, which may become an addicition of some kind.
If the person takes the action of driving the sellers of the chocolates away, then he would have tamed his habit of eating chocolates. Another example is that of a person who is addicted to watching a television due to proximity to the TV.
In order to control this habit, the person can keep it in his or her parents’ house so that he or she can avoid watching it. Skinner outlined various ways of achieving self control. They include stimulus control, self punishment or reinforcement and monitoring one’s behavior among others (Schultz & Schultz, 2009).
The argument on stimulus control is based on the fact that there is a stimulus which is present during the reinforcement or punishment of a response and thus that particular stimulus is associated with that reinforcement or punishment of the response to the extend that the response is likely or unlikely to occur in the presence of that stimulus.
A good example is the counseling given to obese clients. One counselor called Stuart once agreed with his obese clients that they were not supposed to eat when doing something else like talking or watching a television, the reasoning being that the talking or watching the television was capable of influencing the eating behaviors of the obese clients.
For instance, due to talking or watching the television, the clients would end up either abandoning the eating or eating too much without realizing it. This worked very well for the obese clients (Schultz & Schultz, 2009).
Self control can also be achieved through what Skinner calls distraction or simply doing something else. This applies to situations when individuals are surrounded by tempting behaviors and they can easily fall to those temptations. Such individuals can control themselves by redirecting their attention away from the targets (Schultz & Schultz, 2005).
Self control also occurs through self reinforcement or punishment. Sometimes it is not always that the environment woud provide results which can shape our behaviors. In such situations, individuals may act in such a way as to reinforce or punish themselves. In an effort to illustrate this, Bandura set up an experiment in which children in three groups were told to play with a toy wheel by turning it.
Group one did not receive any kind of reinforcement. Group two was told to reinforce itself with some type of tokens and yet the third gruop was reinforced with similar tokens to those used by the second group to reinforce itself. The result was that the second group which reinforced itself and the third group which was reinforced turned the toy wheels more frequently than the group which did not have any kind of reinforcement.
Informing others about one’s goals is also another way of achieving self control. Sometimes telling others about one’s goals may bring some change in the environment. If for instance I tell my friends about my goals, chances are that the friends’ behavior may change significantly, which in turn would contribute in the changing of my behavior.
If I tell them that my goal is to lose weight, the friends may provide the necessary reinforcement for losing it. They can do so either by encouraging me to resist any temptation to gain more weight or they may advise me to enroll in programs for losing weight.
One can also achieve self control through monitoring his or her behavior. One can keep a record of the frequency of a certain behavior and possibly present the information in a graph. The graph can therefore help the individual shape that behavior towards the direction which he or she desires.
As demonstrated in the above explanations of how self control is achieved, one thing becomes very clear; that self control is not generated through internal activity but originates from the ability of an individual to manipulate the external environment in a way that the individual is capable of changing his or her behavior.
This argument is based on the premise that the environment determines our behavior. For us to be able to control our behavior therefore, we have to manipulate the environment so that we get an opportunity to change our behaviors.
I find Skinner’s concept of self control very congruent with his general view point that behavior is determined by our environment and the consequences of our actions. Skinner’s arguments on the concept of self control are clealry explained and they are not in any way contradicting his general point of view. In fact, the arguments actually complement his general point of view.
The reason is because in both the concept of self control and the general point of view, behavior starts and ends with the environment. We can say that the environment forms the denominator in both arguments because if we remove it, both arguments would not make any sense (The critical thinking community, 2011).
In the general point of view, he argues that our behavior is shaped by our actios and the environment in which we live. He says that free will is actually an illlusion. In the concept of self control, he does not attempt to introduce a situation in which free will has an influence on our behaviors.
What he does in the explanation of the concept of self control is to argue that human beings are able to control their behavior by intefering with the same environment which shapes their behavior. After the interference, another environment is created which now shapes our behavior in a different way.
This is not to say that there is an entity known as self control which human beings can use to shape their behavior. This is so because self control is not an environment but rather a process of interfering with an environment to bring the desired choices.
According to John Locke, human beings are born as Tabula Rasa (blank slate), that is, humans are born with empty minds (Reuben, 2005). This leaves the environment as the only channel through which they can acquire behavior. Self control therefore only works to complement the general view point by Skinner and it does not in any way contradict the same.
The attempts to control our behaviors do not occur in a vacuum but rather in an environment. The attempts to change our behavior through manipulating the environment do not always succeed, meaning that self control is not a guarantee to regulation of one’s behavior.
References
Honderich, T. (2005). On Determinism and Freedom. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Reuben, S. (2005). Tabula rasa. Orlando, Fla: Harcourt.
Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E. (2005). Theories of personality. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth.
Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E. (2009). Theories of personality. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
The critical thinking community, (2011). Developing as Rational Persons: Viewing Our Development in Stages. Web.